Lung-Originated Tumor Segmentation from Computed Tomography Scan (LOTUS) Benchmark

Lung cancer is one of the deadliest cancers, and in part its effective diagnosis and treatment depend on the accurate delineation of the tumor. Human-centered segmentation, which is currently the most common approach, is subject to inter-observer variability, and is also time-consuming, considering the fact that only experts are capable of providing annotations. Automatic and semi-automatic tumor segmentation methods have recently shown promising results. However, as different researchers have validated their algorithms using various datasets and performance metrics, reliably evaluating these methods is still an open challenge. The goal of the Lung-Originated Tumor Segmentation from Computed Tomography Scan (LOTUS) Benchmark created through 2018 IEEE Video and Image Processing (VIP) Cup competition, is to provide a unique dataset and pre-defined metrics, so that different researchers can develop and evaluate their methods in a unified fashion. The 2018 VIP Cup started with a global engagement from 42 countries to access the competition data. At the registration stage, there were 129 members clustered into 28 teams from 10 countries, out of which 9 teams made it to the final stage and 6 teams successfully completed all the required tasks. In a nutshell, all the algorithms proposed during the competition, are based on deep learning models combined with a false positive reduction technique. Methods developed by the three finalists show promising results in tumor segmentation, however, more effort should be put into reducing the false positive rate. This competition manuscript presents an overview of the VIP-Cup challenge, along with the proposed algorithms and results.

Is Speech Emotion Recognition Language-Independent? Analysis of English and Bangla Languages using Language-Independent Vocal Features

A language agnostic approach to recognizing emotions from speech remains an incomplete and challenging task. In this paper, we used Bangla and English languages to assess whether distinguishing emotions from speech is independent of language. The following emotions were categorized for this study: happiness, anger, neutral, sadness, disgust, and fear. We employed three Emotional Speech Sets, of which the first two were developed by native Bengali speakers in Bangla and English languages separately. The third was the Toronto Emotional Speech Set (TESS), which was developed by native English speakers from Canada. We carefully selected language-independent prosodic features, adopted a Support Vector Machine (SVM) model, and conducted three experiments to carry out our proposition. In the first experiment, we measured the performance of the three speech sets individually. This was followed by the second experiment, where we recorded the classification rate by combining the speech sets. Finally, in the third experiment we measured the recognition rate by training and testing the model with different speech sets. Although this study reveals that Speech Emotion Recognition (SER) is mostly language-independent, there is some disparity while recognizing emotional states like disgust and fear in these two languages. Moreover, our investigations inferred that non-native speakers convey emotions through speech, much like expressing themselves in their native tongue.

A deep-learning--based multimodal depth-aware dynamic hand gesture recognition system

Any spatio-temporal movement or reorientation of the hand, done with the intention of conveying a specific meaning, can be considered as a hand gesture. Inputs to hand gesture recognition systems can be in several forms, such as depth images, monocular RGB, or skeleton joint points. We observe that raw depth images possess low contrasts in the hand regions of interest (ROI). They do not highlight important details to learn, such as finger bending information (whether a finger is overlapping the palm, or another finger). Recently, in deep-learning--based dynamic hand gesture recognition, researchers are tying to fuse different input modalities (e.g. RGB or depth images and hand skeleton joint points) to improve the recognition accuracy. In this paper, we focus on dynamic hand gesture (DHG) recognition using depth quantized image features and hand skeleton joint points. In particular, we explore the effect of using depth-quantized features in Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) and Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) based multi-modal fusion networks. We find that our method improves existing results on the SHREC-DHG-14 dataset. Furthermore, using our method, we show that it is possible to reduce the resolution of the input images by more than four times and still obtain comparable or better accuracy to that of the resolutions used in previous methods.

Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia Detection from Microscopic Images Using Weighted Ensemble of Convolutional Neural Networks

Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia (ALL) is a blood cell cancer characterized by numerous immature lymphocytes. Even though automation in ALL prognosis is an essential aspect of cancer diagnosis, it is challenging due to the morphological correlation between malignant and normal cells. The traditional ALL classification strategy demands experienced pathologists to carefully read the cell images, which is arduous, time-consuming, and often suffers inter-observer variations. This article has automated the ALL detection task from microscopic cell images, employing deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). We explore the weighted ensemble of different deep CNNs to recommend a better ALL cell classifier. The weights for the ensemble candidate models are estimated from their corresponding metrics, such as accuracy, F1-score, AUC, and kappa values. Various data augmentations and pre-processing are incorporated for achieving a better generalization of the network. We utilize the publicly available C-NMC-2019 ALL dataset to conduct all the comprehensive experiments. Our proposed weighted ensemble model, using the kappa values of the ensemble candidates as their weights, has outputted a weighted F1-score of 88.6 %, a balanced accuracy of 86.2 %, and an AUC of 0.941 in the preliminary test set. The qualitative results displaying the gradient class activation maps confirm that the introduced model has a concentrated learned region. In contrast, the ensemble candidate models, such as Xception, VGG-16, DenseNet-121, MobileNet, and InceptionResNet-V2, separately produce coarse and scatter learned areas for most example cases. Since the proposed kappa value-based weighted ensemble yields a better result for the aimed task in this article, it can experiment in other domains of medical diagnostic applications.

Dermo-DOCTOR: A framework for concurrent skin lesion detection and recognition using a deep convolutional neural network with end-to-end dual encoders

Automated skin lesion analysis for simultaneous detection and recognition is still challenging for inter-class homogeneity and intra-class heterogeneity, leading to low generic capability of a Single Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with limited datasets. This article proposes an end-to-end deep CNN-based framework for simultaneous detection and recognition of the skin lesions, named Dermo-DOCTOR, consisting of two encoders. The feature maps from two encoders are fused channel-wise, called Fused Feature Map (FFM). The FFM is utilized for decoding in the detection sub-network, concatenating each stage of two encoders' outputs with corresponding decoder layers to retrieve the lost spatial information due to pooling in the encoders. For the recognition sub-network, the outputs of three fully connected layers, utilizing feature maps of two encoders and FFM, are aggregated to obtain a final lesion class. We train and evaluate the proposed Dermo-Doctor utilizing two publicly available benchmark datasets, such as ISIC-2016 and ISIC-2017. The achieved segmentation results exhibit mean intersection over unions of 85.0 % and 80.0 % respectively for ISIC-2016 and ISIC-2017 test datasets. The proposed Dermo-DOCTOR also demonstrates praiseworthy success in lesion recognition, providing the areas under the receiver operating characteristic curves of 0.98 and 0.91 respectively for those two datasets. The experimental results show that the proposed Dermo-DOCTOR outperforms the alternative methods mentioned in the literature, designed for skin lesion detection and recognition. As the Dermo-DOCTOR provides better-results on two different test datasets, even with limited training data, it can be an auspicious computer-aided assistive tool for dermatologists.

COVID-19 identification from volumetric chest CT scans using a progressively resized 3D-CNN incorporating segmentation, augmentation, and class-rebalancing

The novel COVID-19 is a global pandemic disease overgrowing worldwide. Computer-aided screening tools with greater sensitivity is imperative for disease diagnosis and prognosis as early as possible. It also can be a helpful tool in triage for testing and clinical supervision of COVID-19 patients. However, designing such an automated tool from non-invasive radiographic images is challenging as many manually annotated datasets are not publicly available yet, which is the essential core requirement of supervised learning schemes. This article proposes a 3D Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based classification approach considering both the inter- and intra-slice spatial voxel information. The proposed system is trained in an end-to-end manner on the 3D patches from the whole volumetric CT images to enlarge the number of training samples, performing the ablation studies on patch size determination. We integrate progressive resizing, segmentation, augmentations, and class-rebalancing to our 3D network. The segmentation is a critical prerequisite step for COVID-19 diagnosis enabling the classifier to learn prominent lung features while excluding the outer lung regions of the CT scans. We evaluate all the extensive experiments on a publicly available dataset, named MosMed, having binary- and multi-class chest CT image partitions. Our experimental results are very encouraging, yielding areas under the ROC curve of 0.914 and 0.893 for the binary- and multi-class tasks, respectively, applying 5-fold cross-validations. Our method's promising results delegate it as a favorable aiding tool for clinical practitioners and radiologists to assess COVID-19.

Dermo-DOCTOR: A web application for detection and recognition of the skin lesion using a deep convolutional neural network

Automated skin lesion analysis for detection and recognition is still challenging for inter-class diversity and intra-class similarity, and the low generic capability of a single Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) with limited datasets. This article proposes an end-to-end deep CNN-based multi-task web application for concurrent detection and recognition of skin lesion, named Dermo-DOCTOR, consisting of two encoders, where the features from each encoder are fused in channel-wise, called Fused Feature Map (FFM). For the detection sub-network, the FFM is used for decoding to obtain the input resolution of the output lesion masks, where the outputs of each stage of two encoders are concatenated with the same scale decoder output to regain the lost spatial information due to pooling in encoders. For the recognition sub-network, feature maps of two encoders and FFM are used for the aggregation to obtain a final lesion class. We train and evaluate the Dermo-Doctor utilizing two publicly available benchmark datasets, such as ISIC-2016 and ISIC-2017. The obtained mean intersection over unions, for detection sub-network, are 85.0 % and 80.0 %, whereas the areas under the receiver operating characteristic curve, for recognition sub-network, are 0.98 and 0.91, respectively, for ISIC-2016 and ISIC-2017 test datasets. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed Dermo-DOCTOR outperforms the alternative methods mentioned in the literature, designed for skin lesion detection and recognition. As the Dermo-DOCTOR provides better-results on two different test datasets, even with limited training data, it can be an auspicious computer-aided screening tool to assist the dermatologists.

Multi-class probabilistic atlas-based whole heart segmentation method in cardiac CT and MRI

Accurate and robust whole heart substructure segmentation is crucial in developing clinical applications, such as computer-aided diagnosis and computer-aided surgery. However, segmentation of different heart substructures is challenging because of inadequate edge or boundary information, the complexity of the background and texture, and the diversity in different substructures' sizes and shapes. This article proposes a framework for multi-class whole heart segmentation employing non-rigid registration-based probabilistic atlas incorporating the Bayesian framework. We also propose a non-rigid registration pipeline utilizing a multi-resolution strategy for obtaining the highest attainable mutual information between the moving and fixed images. We further incorporate non-rigid registration into the expectation-maximization algorithm and implement different deep convolutional neural network-based encoder-decoder networks for ablation studies. All the extensive experiments are conducted utilizing the publicly available dataset for the whole heart segmentation containing 20 MRI and 20 CT cardiac images. The proposed approach exhibits an encouraging achievement, yielding a mean volume overlapping error of 14.5 % for CT scans exceeding the state-of-the-art results by a margin of 1.3 % in terms of the same metric. As the proposed approach provides better-results to delineate the different substructures of the heart, it can be a medical diagnostic aiding tool for helping experts with quicker and more accurate results.

CVR-Net: A deep convolutional neural network for coronavirus recognition from chest radiography images

The novel Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is a global pandemic disease spreading rapidly around the world. A robust and automatic early recognition of COVID-19, via auxiliary computer-aided diagnostic tools, is essential for disease cure and control. The chest radiography images, such as Computed Tomography (CT) and X-ray, and deep Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), can be a significant and useful material for designing such tools. However, designing such an automated tool is challenging as a massive number of manually annotated datasets are not publicly available yet, which is the core requirement of supervised learning systems. In this article, we propose a robust CNN-based network, called CVR-Net (Coronavirus Recognition Network), for the automatic recognition of the coronavirus from CT or X-ray images. The proposed end-to-end CVR-Net is a multi-scale-multi-encoder ensemble model, where we have aggregated the outputs from two different encoders and their different scales to obtain the final prediction probability. We train and test the proposed CVR-Net on three different datasets, where the images have collected from different open-source repositories. We compare our proposed CVR-Net with state-of-the-art methods, which are trained and tested on the same datasets. We split three datasets into five different tasks, where each task has a different number of classes, to evaluate the multi-tasking CVR-Net. Our model achieves an overall F1-score & accuracy of 0.997 & 0.998; 0.963 & 0.964; 0.816 & 0.820; 0.961 & 0.961; and 0.780 & 0.780, respectively, for task-1 to task-5. As the CVR-Net provides promising results on the small datasets, it can be an auspicious computer-aided diagnostic tool for the diagnosis of coronavirus to assist the clinical practitioners and radiologists. Our source codes and model are publicly available at https://github.com/kamruleee51/CVR-Net.

DFR-TSD: A Deep Learning Based Framework for Robust Traffic Sign Detection Under Challenging Weather Conditions

Robust traffic sign detection and recognition (TSDR) is of paramount importance for the successful realization of autonomous vehicle technology. The importance of this task has led to a vast amount of research efforts and many promising methods have been proposed in the existing literature. However, the SOTA (SOTA) methods have been evaluated on clean and challenge-free datasets and overlooked the performance deterioration associated with different challenging conditions (CCs) that obscure the traffic images captured in the wild. In this paper, we look at the TSDR problem under CCs and focus on the performance degradation associated with them. To overcome this, we propose a Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) based TSDR framework with prior enhancement. Our modular approach consists of a CNN-based challenge classifier, Enhance-Net, an encoder-decoder CNN architecture for image enhancement, and two separate CNN architectures for sign-detection and classification. We propose a novel training pipeline for Enhance-Net that focuses on the enhancement of the traffic sign regions (instead of the whole image) in the challenging images subject to their accurate detection. We used CURE-TSD dataset consisting of traffic videos captured under different CCs to evaluate the efficacy of our approach. We experimentally show that our method obtains an overall precision and recall of 91.1% and 70.71% that is 7.58% and 35.90% improvement in precision and recall, respectively, compared to the current benchmark. Furthermore, we compare our approach with SOTA object detection networks, Faster-RCNN and R-FCN, and show that our approach outperforms them by a large margin.